As I mentioned earlier, remembering my life is, in part, actively travelling the roads back through the different neighborhoods and houses I have called home over the years.

Our first moves (“our” being my family), from Manitoba avenue in the north end, over the iconic Redwood bridge, which crosses our city’s main water line, the Red River, to Avaco Drive; and then to Eade Crescent shortly after in North Kildonan, exist in a flurry of scattered pictures and moments, Eade crescent remains a bit more vivid if only because this is where coming of school age afforded me a better and more acute sense of recognizable patterns and routines. Even then, it’s possible for me to sit with any one of those scattered pictures and moments and find myself transported back to a young kid taking shape, emerging from shadows as something resemlbling an embodied life. Something more than simple snapshots of a five year old kid trudging across a field to his kindegarten class (what makes this image, likely my earliest memory, stand out all these years later I have no idea).

What I remember the most about our brief time living on Avaco Drive is perhaps the quintessential childhood stuff. Favorite past times like climibing with my brothers on to the top of our roof and jumping off, out of sight of our parents of course. Or encountering the older neighborhood bullies, whom once intercepted me and my younger brother pushing eachother in our recently aquired stranded grocery store cart to the park down the street. Effectively grabbing the cart and stranding my brother in a massive (to us at the time) puddle (and subsequently getting an ear full from my mother in the process). I remember some of our early halloween nights, and in the summer playing on our slip and slide with the girl who lived across the backlane. In fact, it was on one of our last evenings at this house, a warm, sunny, summers day. that we were doing precisely this as we said goodbye to our neighbourhood friends.

Eade Crescent would be where I spent most of those early years (Grades 1-3) at John De Graffe School, walking to and from school around the Bay and across the field. Running home at lunch time to sit in font of that old t.v. and catch yet another episode of the old animated Spiderman television show. Whittling away mornings and evenings and long summer breaks playing marbles- my first true foray into the idea of the “collection”- in the school yard, and getting swindled in some very unforutnate trades at the same time. Having to play the obligatory games of “these are the Daves I know, I know,” given that I was one of four in my classroom. I still remember that long, wooden ruler that hung on the wall of the principles office, ready to be used on anyone who got out of line. The sort of image that stays stuck in your brain for a lifetime. I remember the iconic babysitter from the time, whom would make her way down the stairs, which stemmed down from the doorway, and situate herself in front of the t.v. where she would watch wrestling all night, making us boys go to bed early and warning us about disrupting her space.

In what could very well have been an incident with untold life long consequences, one sunny summer evening the three of us boys were out back playing around with a bat and ball. The house actually opened up on to the field behind us, so it was as though we had our very own acreage. I had just wandered over to where my younger brother was dialing up a pitch to my older sibling, and unaware had bent down to look at something. As I stood up, it happened to be at the precise time my older brother was dialing up a massive swing of the bat. My head caught the backwards momentum, the force knocking the world straight into circles. I’m not sure how long the world kept spinning, but without a doubt what I was experiencing was a significant concusssion of a young brain. Sometimes I wonder, if they did a brain scan today if they might see the remnants of some kind of damage.

If there is a single individual who stands out from this point in my life it would be a fellow named Andy, a guy whom I would cross paths with over the years in some unexpected ways given that our friendship never really suvrived the transition into junior high. In fact, it was Andy who would be the first to part ways, moving out of the neighborhood before I ultimatley ended up transitioning to the priavte school (Calvin Christian) down the road in Grade 4.

My connection with Andy actually begins with the Church we shared as kids, the iconic and historic Calvary Temple, which remains a relevant fixsture in Winnipeg’s downtown core to this day. Being the same age we would find ourselves in the same sunday school class, although I never truly connected who he was until our paths crossed at John De Graffe. He was “that guy” from church who I saw on occasion and whom had been over at our place once or twice when our parents were visiting. Now I knew him more personally by face and name, and we spent that brief forging a schoolyard relationship.

After he left John De Graffe, we didn’t really cross paths again until we found ourselves attending the same school in Grade 10 (M.B.C.I). At this juncture in our lives the thing that brought us together was music, him a learned bass player, me just beginning to take my foray into drumming seriously. This “connection” played out as well into our then new church life, as another mutual classmate named Tim, a singer/guitar player, led worship at the youth group we were now attending.

Eventually, as the years went on, following graduation the very fluid nature of the church world found our paths constantly diverging and reconnnecting. At one point, in a comic moment, one of those “reconnecting” moments found us sharing our place of work- an organization called Foods System Management. The job was simple. We had a warehouse full of food and products that would eventually go out to different schools in the city. We received weekly shipments which we then used to restock the shelves. My job,as the senior worker in the building, was taking care of the freezer area, and when a vacancy opened up in the wharehouse, suddenly Andy came into the picture, bringing with him yet another mutual classmate from our highschool years- Jeremy.

Looking back now, I can see the eventual trainwreck that was coming a good ways down the track. Although I was the senior worker, I was not the one that should have been responsible for these two big and boisterous personalities. Having the three of us largely left alone in the buidling was difficult to corral and keep in order, and all three of us knew it. It didn’t help that they also didn’t like our boss (I wasn’t the biggest fan either, but I had a lot more on the line than they did).

In any case, on one particular morning we were receiving a weekly shipment, which meant one of us had to be positioned at the bottom of the conveyer belt, another at the top helping to transfer goods on to a roller, and the third at the end of the rollers stacking the recieved goods on to a wooden platform.

I was at the top receiving goods from the conveyer belt and transferring them to the rollers.

Being the one with the longest tenure, I had done this many times over. It’s a simple procedure that relied on creating a rhythm. If the person at the bottom is going too fast, the person at the top can’t keep up and/or the rollers get jammed up. I had explained this to my two “co-workers,” but being prone to finding antics behind every corner, instead of heeding instructions they decided to have a little fun, the one loading the belt far too quickly while the other snickered and watched awaiting the anticipated fiasco it would create at my juncture.

There was only so much I could do until things started to clog up, pushing products off the belt and on to the floor, the inevitable fits of laughter ensuing from my co-workers now getting louder on either end. This wasn’t the worst thing in the world… until it came to the big pails of cooking oil. Once that toppled, then the fun really started.

Andy suddenly snapped to attention as I was busy trying to get the pail standing upright, the lid having popped off and oil spilling out onto the floors. As I was attempting to attend to the oil, more and more of the goods just kept falling off the belt and on to the floor behind me. Now the oil was beginning to spread everywhere, making it impossible to stand and get either Jeremy or the conveyer to stop. At one point I ultimately end up flat on my back, lying full bodied in the liquid.

Next thing I know Andy’s now on his back as well. We both try to make our way over to eachother but neither of us could stand up. So there we both were, lying helplless in a gigantic puddle of oil as more and more packages just kept tumbling off the belt. Jeremy finally finishes, and comes back up to the warehouse where, the oil now having spread across the entire space, he also promptly ends up on his back.

So there we were, the three of us, simply lying there staring at each other like we had been scripted in to an old I Love Lucy episode. At some point one of us started laughing. What else was there to do. And then the three of us are laughing. At the same time, the receptionist from the lower level had decided she need to bring us some paperwork, and despite our best efforts at momentary protestations ends up coming straight through the door.

Needless to say, that boss none of us liked wasn’t happy. Attempts to clean up the mess on our own time took forever. Stuff really hit the fan when the monthly inventory ended up so out of whack the following week that the bosses punitive measure of forcing us three to come back in on our own time on a Saturday to redo it led to my two friends ultimatley choosing to not show up and never come back.

That was a long day doing inventory on my own.

There’s a second story, perhaps a bit more serious and arguably more relevant and important, but nevertheless still with the same level of dramatics.

I can’t remember where we were precisely, but somehow I ended up getting a ride home with Andy and Jeremy from some event we were both at as young adults (as I mentioned, the church world can tend to be small). During the ride they had been having some discussions regarding their newfound charismatic convictions about the role of faith and healing in the Christian life. It was known that I had a long standing chronic ear condition stemming from when I was six months old, which had ultimately left me fully deaf in my right ear and partially deaf in my left. In my right, the chronic infection had eaten away at my ear drum and the bones inside my ear, leaving me with only the  mastoid (the big one at the base).

Once they dropped me off, I had gone into my house and was already in my room getting ready for bed when I heard a knock on the door. My room is on the main floor right next to the front entrance. Everyone else is sleeping in their rooms upstairs as it is past midnight. I go to the door and it’s my friends. They ask… actually it was more like a demand, to come into my room so that they can pray for me to receive the gift of tongues, as they were certain that the reason why my ears had never been healed is because I didn’t have enough faith. Receiving the gfit of tongues would be a sign of that necessary faith.

I didn’t consent. I didn’t agree. I also didn’t have the ability to resist. Next thing I know we are in my room, I am sitting on my bed, and the two of them are towering over me with a list of intent and aggressive instructions. I was to settle on a syllable. Once I had that syllable, I was supposed to turn that over repeatedly on my tongue. As i did this they were then going to pray. They would then begin to pray over me in their tongues until, on their word, I would take over. At that point I would recieve the gift.   

What is kind of funny about this whole ordeal is that the two of them were so eager to get to their “speaking in tongues” part that they payed no attention to the fact that I hadn’t actually started the process. They didn’t even give me the opportunity, had I wanted, to turn a chosen syllabel over on my own tongue. And in fact, at this point in the charade I was far too concerned with their own very loud syllables waking up my parents to think about any inner “promptings.” Things got more intense when they started jumping down in a holy frenzy.

The tongues never did come. My hearing never returned. My friends were visibly dejected, although not without the capacity to leave me with a final word- one day, they hoped, I would have enough faith.

Perhaps in a different way, replaying this whole scene likewise brings back memories of my parents dragging me down as a young kid (6, 7 years old, maybe a bit older?) to the front of the church one Sunday morning to have the pastor anoint me with oil and pray his own words of healing. I still remember the terror I felt in that moment, grasping at the railings in desperation and crying/screaming loud enough for everyone to hear me multiple buildings over. I even remember the Pastor’s face, looking at me with a sense of deep and troubled concern, as though something was wrong with me beyond just my ears. I don’t know. Mabye he thought I was possessed by a demon or something. All I can say with a fair degree of certainty that these memories would become part of the demons which would haunt me going forward. Perhaps just not in the way anyone intended.

Speaking of my ears. Perhaps the most significant memory of my time at John De Graffe, those years between Grade 1 and Grade 3, was my first major surgery- a mastoidectonomy. Where they dig a separate canal into your ear so as to allow it to properly drain and avoid future infections. It was my first experience of being put under with anaesthesia. Still one of the oddest experiences I think one can have in their lifetime (at least from my perspective). That feeling of sinking deeper and deeper away from reality, where faces and voices counting backwards from 10 slowly become distanced and more and more narrowed until the world appears like a pinhole in the fabric of space and time, and no matter how much you try to grasp at that hole in the distance you can’t reach it. It’s unnerving. I can still smell and taste the anaesthesia lingering in the backdrop of those memories.

Coming back into consciousness might be even more unsettling in some ways, as there is no way to actually prepare for the shock to the system. Before you can say “no, leave me be, I just want to go back to sleep,” hands are grabbing and forcing you into a sitting position, all so that you can promptly throw up into a bucket that has managed to show up suddenly out of nowwhere. In my case, this is also when I first notice the massive bandage around my head and imagine that they’ve actually lobotamized a part of my brain.

Recovery includes not having to go to school, drinking ginger ail (because back then it was a cure all), getting a care package of cards and gifts from my whole class, and eventually follow up appointments with my quirky, older Jewish ear doctor named Dr. Brodovski, who would always emphasize my name by flipping the A and the I around (so, DIVAD), marked by the routine breakfast or lunch with my mom at the old cafeteria in the medical arts building downtown. My go to was the cinnamon bun, as they were not only big, they would toast them on the grill and then butter them. Perfection.

Actually, another significant part of this time in my life would be my love of action figures, a segway that works well here given that another ritual built into my surgery days was getting a new action figure before heading in. If marbles was my entry point into the art of the “collection,” collecting action figures became my first full fledged hobby.

Along with subsequently getting swindled by some really terrible trades yet again. The monetary worth that could have been in my possession had I been aware.

Although if I am being honest, it never really occurred to me that a collection should sit on the shelf. I don’t think that ever would have made sense to me. For me, these figures were intended to be used. They were there for me to create worlds I could then get lost in. This wasn’t limited to just action figures either, although i spent many days and evenings on my own, often twirling around in cirlces, an action figure in both hands, sometimes for an hour straight. I know this confused my parents, but there was something about being caught up in that state of motion that transported me to another place. By spinning around in a circle, and yes, I get the irony here, the world would somehow stand still, the only thing in view then being the characters I was holding in front of me. Everything else would blur out of focus.

In a more visceral and physical fashion, that same spirit of play would apply itself to my brothers and I making a habit, especially when friends came over, of turning our basement and furniture into our playground, typically choosing a gigantic fort, often times with an enacted drama where we would be running away from home, usually on a raft, being chased by our parents. Or else carting the furniture out on to our front lawn where we would make a train and embark on a journey to whereever our little hearts desired.

More innocent times, to be sure. Although for me, deeper wrestlings were already well on their way to taking root as I muddled my way through the different experiences of growing up into this world. My chronic nightmares were still alive and well, the stories I was reading getting more and more nuanced and complex. It would be at Eade Crescent that I first encountered E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, a book that would open me up to deeper questions about this thing we call existence. Equally so the likes of Rolad Dahl, Beatrice Potter, A.A. Milne. It was also at Eade Crescent that my mom read Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe around the supper table. A stepping stone into L’Engle and Susan Cooper. It was also around this time that I was deep into John Bibee’s The Spirit Flyer series and local Winnipeg author John White’s famed fantasy series, The Archives of Anthropos. As someone who always found himself struggling to fit in at school, at home (comes with the territory of being the middle child and the only one without the name John/Jane I suppose), and in the world, this was where I could begin to make sense of things. The thoughts in my head. The polarizing experiences I was finding in the world. The thoughts and feelings I was having that were often met with misunderstanding and confusion to those on the outside.

Switching from John De Graffe to Calvin Christian after finishing grade 3 was of course marked by an eventual move from Eade Crescent to Morning Meade, a slightly bigger bay further north in the area of North Kildonan. Another “transition.” But of course, as with any turn in ones journey we bring the formative stuff of the past with us as we go. I’ve been mulling over what would be the key thing from this time in my life that begins to frame my story moving forward. I think the biggest thing these memories make alive for me is that, for whatever reason, the restlessness I know more concretely today has always been a part of me. Yes, I had experienced this as that young, 5 year old kid floating in and out of dreams and reality back on Manitoba avenue, but here it takes on a new shape- recontextualization. Here i begin to take that experience and formulate it into a childhood, as one drawn to wonder amidst the figurative struggles. One always seeking something true outside of myself, but also one who always had this sense that I was largely left to do this alone, peering through the cracks of the constructs and expectations that surrounded me. Being in the midst of this reality but often finding myself in that figurative twirling, moving in and out of these “worlds” at a moments noitce.

Yes, that sounds hyperbolic, I know. But this is the story these memories bring back. These are the words I have to describe it. This is, I think what becomes important for fleshing out the next chapter of my life.

Got a life, and it’s my first time living
Got eyes, but that don’t mean I have vision
Some days just getting through is winning
Some days you just say good riddance

Got a heart, but it’s my first time feeling
Got a floor that used to be my ceiling
Some people have a way of reaching
All the parts you have a hard time seeing

Funny how life’s a coin with two sides
Breaks you and loves you at the same damn time

• Songs I’d Rather Not Sing (The Fray)

“For we cannot do anything against the Truth, but only for the Truth.”

• 2 Corinthians 13:8

Days off mean giving space to sitting with my thoughts

Been thinking about this question this morning- what is knowledge. How do we know what is true.

Is knowledge facts? Data points? Information?
Or is knowledge something other? Does knowing something need another category to give it proper definition?

And if it is something other, how do we attain this knowledge? Or more to the point, how do we attain this knowledge in a way that matters? That can make sense of this thing we call Reality, or Life?

As the lyrics cited above suggest, it seems intuitive to say that sight reduced to its purely material (biological) function can be applied in a way that even someone who sees in the biological sense is capable of not actually seeing a true thing at all. It’s not a stretch to say we think of a biological brain in the same way. We “think” in these terms all the time.

It’s a question N.T Wright brings to the table in his book The Vision of Ephesians, unpacking Paul’s grand prayer at the end of chapter 1 for his readers to “know.” A prayer that follows 1:3-14, which is best heard as a single thought (with no breaks), expressing a “combined, glorious shout of praise.” (page 17) A brief section that works to  ncorportate the “whole” of the story into that grander vision.

To that end, here Paul isnt speaking about propositions, but rather actual experience of capital R “Reality.” In fact, a direct phrasing in this passage connects this to “the eyes of the heart,” the seat of a persons knowledge in the ANE. As 1:18 states, this is what enables knowing, and such knowledge is what enables hope. Or in the three fold focus of the prayer, this is what brings us to the interconnecting themes of hope-inheretence-power, which work to bind the bigger picture together. Which, as Wright helps flesh out, flow from the three central texts the prayer is evoking and pulling from- Psalm 110, Isaiah 11, Psalm 8. Wright makes the further point that part of this grand vision is the way it uses these textual references to attach the narrative of Jesus to the Temple imagery that dominated the Judean context. In this sense, it is not a picture of us excaping this reality to go somewhere else, but of God taking residence in this creation. The concept of “filling the earth,” which IS the temple, and further filling us (being “in Christ”) through the indwelling of the Spirit as image bearers placed within the temple. In this imagery we find the movement of the story. It is about the space beging prepared for God to come down and dwell within. This is what the sacrificial imagery was all about-purifying the space from the pollution of Sin and Death so that God might be made known through this presence in the temple (and in the larger narrative, creaiton and in the lives of God’s image bearers).

Similar to how the above lyrics lean into the language of living and feeling in describing a world that is otherwise incoherent. We indwell this life in the same way. To know God is to participate in this Reality, the question being whether we do so in hope (the victory of God over the enslaving Powers of Sin and Death), inheretance (the promise of new creation), and Power (the rule of God through the outpouring of the Spirit). Without this, what we have is a world that lifts you up and breaks you down and leaves you stranded inside its grand illusion of a life.

Sometimes feeling like winning
Sometimes feeling like saying good riddance

This is the heart of Paul’s vision in the letter to the Ephesians, which is actually a letter, as Wright points out, which was meant not for a single community but to be circled and cycled through the different communities and the generations that would follow;

“I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheretence among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greateness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.”

(Ephesians 1:17-19)

If, as Wright suggests, we think of the Pauline letters as rooms in a house, Galatians becomes the kitchen where the important things are getting practically fleshed out in relationship to Jesus, the Judean and Gentile communities, and the Church, Romans is the formal dining room where everything is eventually properly layed out in specific fashion as part of a fully cooked and orchestrated meal of ideas and convictions, the letters to the Corinthians are the bedrooms and living rooms where discourse and infighting and regular patterns of living happen inbetween, and Ephesians would be that room tucked away at the back of the house looking out and away across the sea (perhaps with an after dinner drink), reflecting on the entire journey.

In working on my life story over the past couple years, one thread that opened up is the fight that has followed me all my life, to know that what I believe is in fact true. Behind this of course is the idea of fear, but for me it has never been a fear that what I believe isn’t true, as though I need to protect some dogma. Rather, in a paradoxical sense it is a fear that my life (my choices, my repsonses) doesn’t reflect what I believe to be true. It is about whether there is integrity between my actual partcipation in this world and the knowledge I am naming as true. For this relationship to reflect something rational and logically coherent.

Which of course requires knowledge of what is true, but examining that inherent need imbedded in me, a need that has often found me on the outside and isolated from the different collective circles in my efforts to “critique” all social constructs (and indeed my perpetual rejection of all social constructs, like the good cynic must always engage). I have come to realize that the only way to really know something is to live it. All else are disconnected facts and data that cannot say anything at all about this world we are embodying. To this end i have come to adopt what is called participationist philosophy/theology. When it comes to what we know, we don’t live in a world reduced to information, we live in a world where knowledge is an embodied practice

And if there is a way to understanding why this need has haunted me all my life, it is in the notion that life itself hinges upon this reality. Regardless of how we play with different ideas, a life sees truly only through the sort of belief that enables participation.

Which is really the tension. We stake our lives on what we believe we know, and yet the only way into such knowledge is to live it. Thus is the conundrum, made all the more maddening by the fact that we must participate in a word that lifts up and destroys as it goes. Thus, as Wright fleshes out in his book, why the best word for faith is trust. A trusting allegiance defined through participatory language that always must be risking something. We can call that something “a life.”

To push that further- such knowledge means participating in a given story about Reality. Thats what a life reveals, is a story. The same life that can only be truly understood through that storied lens. And for me, I have always felt driven to seek a story that makes sense of the world i am participating in. Anything else is to render it lost.

And to be honest, the older I get the harder that participation becomes.

A final thought to this end. In the second Corinthians passage quoted above, one might be tempted to read Truth in propositional terms. And yet this would miss the point. The Truth being referenced is participatory. As the larger passage suggests, the Truth is the claim that Jesus Christ is in you through His participation in the flesh, thus handing us a particular Reality we are then enabled to “live” into. That is the call the letter is reminding its readers of. Which is precisely what unfolds within that grander vision of Ephesians Wright is exploring as well;

“Paul expounds what is true of the Messiah in biblical and Judean thought, in order that he may urge his readers to realize that if they are in the Messiah then all this belongs to them as well.” (page 32)

What is true for the Messiah will be true for those participation “in Christ.”

This is intuitive, I think, to how any and all knowledge works. This is in fact what Martin Shaw’s recent book Liturgies of the Wild is all about as well, a book I recently finished (and loved). In a world that has largely redefined what it means to know in the reductionist terms of “information,” humanity’s need for an embodied story pushes forward. Perhaps the reason that can seem fearful (at least to me) is because it’s a much more difficult thing to control. In fact, unlike a world reduced to information it can’t be controlled. One might say thats what affords belief it’s power

*as mentioned elsewhere in this space, these installments are my intention to get a very rough draft of a personal project I have been working on for a numbers of years (writing my life story) off the word d and somewhere where it could hold me accountable to doing something with it.

At this point I am jumping ahead in the timeline, as the period between 2000 and 2003 plays a significant role in shaping what I could (and will) call the two sides of my life. If there is a whole lot of life lived in-between that aformentioned experience frommy  Grade 5 year, it would be this later period where it begins to take on new and fresh meaning in the scope of my story.

Having just graduated with my degree in Youth Leadership from a local college/seminary (Providence College), my church, the church that had played in a significant role in my formation from the time I joined is humble beginnings as a house church at 18, was also in the midst of it’s own crisis. It’s worth mentioning that not only was this church birthed from a similar conflict, one that once left my then graduating self lost and confused before handing me what would become a new found identity, it would be sometihng I can say I helped build from the ground up.

It could be argued that this (then) present conflict paralleled a larger sense of disatisfaction and deconstruction that was reaching well beyond the walls of this specific church body, embodied in what could fairly be described as a mass exodus of many in my generation from the church culture we had inhereted from the 80’s and 90’s. What’s notable about this exodus is that it was far from uniform. On one side were those leaving what had become labeled a post-modern, watered down Christianity, for the then burgeoning and, at the time, emergent neo-reformed circles taking North America by storm. This movement was marketed as a demand for more intelligent, more bookish, more “biblical,” more robust credal expressions of the Church driven by a need to reclaim and thus preserve the hallmarks of historic orthodox theology.

Meanwhile, on the other side stood those for whom the whole post-modern climate had pushed them towards a different sort of “critique” of the same problem.  Rather than seeking to reclaim orthodoxy, they were seeking to abandon the whole enterprise altogether,

These two sides did not get along

And neither did the two central pastors at my church.

Where did this leave me? Thinking back on it, there definitely was a degree to which I found myself trying to figure things out for myself, and largely without a whole lot of support. Equally so while my once coherent world was once again being pulled out from under me. For the nearly 8 years prior to this stuff all coming to a head, my identity had been rooted in my connection to a place that had been defined by these people. They were my world, as they were that Church. And like the shifting tides, I often found a tendency, probably out of desperation to hold on to some sense of coherency while silently grieving a still undefined and unclarified loss, to double down in defence of whichever side was being attacked in a given moment. Which isolated me more than anything. I think a part of me believed, or at least hoped, that we were somehow, at the heart of it all, fighting for the same thing, and that somehow something of what had helped the world to make sense might be preserved. Instead, the more people began to leave and disappear, the more alone I felt.

Or perhaps better put, the more alone I became (sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between feelings and truth). In this case there was, without a doubt, a tangible and physical change when it came to the space itself. And given the degree to which my own sense of self was attached to this place, I was becoming more and more unfamiliar and uncertain in the process of my own handle on truth and identity as well.

And for that matter, who God was.

As I’ve heard it put by some, it led to a kind of homelessness.

There were other factors at play too, all playing an equal role in my feeling lost at this particular moment of my life. I’ll speak more about these things later, but 10 years of pursuing a career in music had come to an abrupt end. A part catalyist for that shift- my investment in the youth ministry at my church- had culminated in a quiet, unspoken rejection by the powers that be. Both brothers had now moved out of my parents home, leaving me unable to clarify where my own home was. I had lost my dog Ginger, my best friend. One of the pastors at my church who had been a vital mentor through the choas of these moments in my life had become a casualty of the exodus.

On top of this, everything I had been taught to believe was being called into question at the same time.

I no longer recognized the world that I had been formed within. I no longer knew who I was.

I no longer knew what was true.

I would press this even further and say it more concretely- everything felt like a lie.

Shifting for a brief moment of time into the world of neo-reformed zelousness, led as it was by its patron saint John Piper, had only served to create more uncertainty and more confusion. Whatever bookishness it had promised me ultimately revealed itself to be more about gatekeeping than actual honest inquiry. The post-modern liberalism on the other end of the spectrum felt equally problematic, being more obsessed with targeted (and often angry) deconstruction than coherent, rational conversation. And to stay where I was, in what was a highly competitive church environment seeking to reinforce the fortress and stop the bleeding, seemed to be constantly telling me, with it’s type A level vigour, that who I was was inevitably not good enough to belong to this circle, leaving me on the outside of all three of these spaces.

And so I quietly left the whole enterprise- Christianity, the world- life- behind. I went through the motions, but internally I was becoming more and more the hardened cynic. I shoved my degree in my pocket, slowly left the ministries I had been serving with (namely youth and music), and got a job at a government agency involved with social services relating to high risk youth, dipping in and out of delivering papers on the side (later bringing in a short stint with my childhood hero, Scholastic Book Fairs).

It was around this time, now about 27 years of age, that I eventually moved out of my parents house and into a shared split level house with a friend. Which is really where I hit my lowest point, my existential crisis coming to a boiling point. Sadly affecting my friend in the process.

Usually when we speak of such crisis points we are also speaking of notable transitions. This might be seen as points of no return. It can be points of revelation or points of change and redirection. This was true for me. The reason I see this as my lowest point is because it was the moment my life took an unexpected turn, bringing me back full circle to that pivotal Grade 5 moment where I found myself confronting a whole new manifestation of those fears.

My parents had decided to go away, and they asked me to house sit/dog sit. I agreed. Looking back, I do wonder whether this was a moment that I leaned into with intention precisely because it afforded me space to disappear into. When you can’t handle life, even living with a roomate becomes too much to navigate. When you’re in a dark spot, that isolation and aloneness becomes something that we desperately seek and crave.

It was late one evening sitting alone in front of my parent’s computer, after having hashed out yet another conversation with my older brother online (our relationship had come to be defined by these kinds of cyclical conversations for a while now, ever since he had disappeared from the picture at 16 (for me, 14) years of age. To be honest his physical absence had been in play ever since elementary school found our lives incidentally parting ways). Having come to define myself as an atheist, which is really a term that emerges from and justifies ones rejection of their religious upbringing, thus being somewhat redundant, this particular convo. although arguably reflecting nothing out of the norm, had led me to present myself with a challenge. I had been asking people within the online atheist communities I was engaging, whether there was a genuine answer to this simple question- why should I not kill myself.

An important caveat here- this is not to say I was necessarily suicidal. This was a hypothetical exercise. I don’t think I cared either way. Whatever was driving me was based on a singular concern, which was a haunted need to know the integrity of my belief. Meaning, knowing that my choices and actions and the way I lived my life lined up with what I genuintely thought to be true about reality and this world. Why was that so important? I’m not sure. I might suggest, as I’ve hinted at through my story up to this point, that this was ingrained in me as a young kid pouring myself into books. The more stories I encountered the more questions it raised about reality and the world. As a young kid i felt, and inuitively understood, that such questions could not be detached from the way I lived my life. All I knew was that it seemed to matter what I believed to be true if my convictions were going to be rational, coherent and revelant.

The question about suicide sseemed to be a microcosm of this greater concern, and one which poked at some of our most tightly held assumptions and values. If one was to simply say no, you should not end your life., the next question would be, why not? What is it that prevents me from doing so? A cognitive/biological resistance? An ideological one? An emotional one? If there are good rational reasons to do so, why do I choose not to? And why would I call this necessary? My hope was to be able to get underneath the limits I was seeing (and feeling) to exist within the entire rational enterprise, at least when it came to confronting what people were willing to accept within the atheistic framework I had taken on for myself. After all, if we ridicule religious communities for apparently being unwilling to face reality and instead holding on to comfortable illusions in response, our atheism should not be doing the exact the same thing if we want to take it seriously.

I never got a real, genuine answer to my question, and so I concluded that people simply didn’t like the answer atheism rationally demanded from us in its necessary logical process.

Great, now I’ve isolated myself in these cricles too. Turns out atheists didn’t like being challenged any more than the christians.

I honestly don’t remember what precisely triggered the following move, but it emerged from this particular conversation on that particular night that I had with my brother. I also wouldn’t say this was a completely serious endeavor, although it was rooted in a weird sort of appeal to seek that aformentioned integrity. The question of God lingered in the background of my past life. So why not play to it’s relevance? Playing off something my brother had said, I reached into my backpack of cliches and pulled out a tried and true trope. I prayed to God right there in the darkness of that empty house and said, hey God, here’s my challenge. Let’s see if you can move a chess piece. If you are real, give me something, anything, that you know would make me believe.

After all, as every good atheist knows, the problem of divine hiddenness is one of the most damning realities for religion, right?

And then I went to sleep.

And I got up.

Nothing.

Not that I was really considering it. Not that I was expecting anything. My mind was still on the rational problem of my question, not the spiritual crisis problem. For me that was a silly game. The challenge I had conjured up in the moment as part had been a momentary expression of my cyncism.

I continued on with my day. This was a day when I happened to be going to meet with someone who was associated with my church. After all, when it comes to such shifts in ones worldview it’s not like you are able to completely change the shape of your world. You co-exist within it. This is when I happened upon someone whom I did not know. As it turns out, this individual, who did not know me or my struggles, had been praying the evening prior and had felt prompted to write down some words. She wasn’t sure if they were meant for anything, but she wrote them down. In this moment she felt like they were meant for me. And so she gave them to me.

They recounted the words of my prayer from the previous night.

More than that, they tasked me with the act of remembering, recalling the events on my bike from Grade 5. I came to call this my letter from God. And this started a journey through comparative religions and eventually back to Christianity, albeit a Christianity that looked a lot different than the one I had left behind.

It also did something that, for me, was quite profound- it broke the chains of what I would now call a present manifestation of that aforementioned fear. A fear rooted in this haunting need to get things right. For my beliefs to be truly rational and logical, and for my life to be willing to match the implications of whatever that truth demanded. I will get further into this with my story as well, but part of what was being uncovered in these moments was also a fear of being midusnderstood, something that I have come to see as intimately connected to that need to get things right.

These years of my life were captured by patterns of conversations, encounters, relationships, social circles, work environments, all meeting this same seemingly insurmountable wall when it came to my need to challenge what I perceived as constructs and conventions and gaps in the world’s reasoning and logic. Perhaps most aware in the area of assumptions regarding personhood and conceptions of the self. As I have come to learn over my now near 50 years of life, we can fight and fight to convince ourselves that we are a self-made individual, which is the assumption most social and societal constructs are built on, but we are never more or less than the person we are in someone else’s story. Thus, to feel misunderstood is one of the most frightening feelings there is, precisely because it’s the thing that holds your entire life in its grip. It is shaping and telling our story. As the old adage goes, to know and be known. One of the truest cliches regarding the nature of the human experience.

Side note- I read a few helpful books regarding how to write your life story as an amateur, and one of the common refrains I came across was the freedom these authors gave to both tell your story as you see it, but also to understand that your story is similtaneously telling the story of the many “others” whom find roles on your stage and in your play. There is no easy answer to this end, simply the freedom to recognize the push and pull and to let go of the fear of gettting it wrong. After all, “as you see it,” can more aptly be described as one’s wrestling with the different versions of “you” the world has defined and created.

One of the interesting things that surfaced for me in reflecting on this important transition in my life is the way it calls forward the thoughts in my first chapter on the importance of distinguishing between what is life and what is death. As I suggested, the minute we lose the ability to define Death (capitalized with intention), we lose the ability to define Life.

And I don’t use these words in the sense of simple existence and non-existence. I don’t think fear of death in the sense of “non-existence,” which is how it is commonly used, is ever the point. Assumptions that we fear that kind of death are always a mask for the true fears running underneath. Instead, I use these words in the broader sense of two different kinds of reality. Death embodies decay, suffering, oppression, division, chaos. Life embodies transformation, order, freedom, unity.

One of the great inconsistencies that I engaged in my atheism was the fact that I found it deemed it to be rational and acceptable to play fast and loose with these categories of Life and Death. Doing so might have the appearance of coherency, and even intellectual integrity, but beyond not being logically coherent, such an approach has a hard time making sense of our actual experience of this world. In the living I find it is the exact opposite- we assume these to be hard and fast categories embedded within reality. The sort of willfull ignorance required to play fast and loose with our definitions is in fact masking a real cognitive dissonance. A cognitive disonnance which, in my opinion, is built on modern resistance to binaries and polarities. Pull back the curtain on how this world works and you find these binaries at work all over the place.

In many ways, over the course of telling my story I will keep coming back to where I started on this basic observation- the need to constantly be defining, in changing contexts and cirucmstance, Life and Death as distinguishable from one another was ingrained in me from my very youngest years. Without that nothing else can possibly make sense. It is what drew me to the power of story in the first place. It is what drew me to the necessary place of the imagination. It is what frames my longing for ongoing discussion and debate and critique, for the pursuit of the rational in partnership with what I have come to know as the spirit.

And yes, it is what makes sense of my deeply felt need to be understood.

On that level, I don’t know if that chronic restlessness is a curse or a blessing. It certainly has the power to create enemies and form rifts. And yet I have also found likeminded souls along the way, people with shared language and shared concern whom could not be understood without it. Some of which I know personally, others which remain encounters from a distance, be it writers, filmmakers, thinkers, philosophers. Which helps me feel a little less crazy at the very least. On my brightest days, a little less alone.

Or as I once hear it said from the famed avante garde filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky, “We all exist in our own personal reality of craziness.” It’s simply a matter of learning to see that others share that reality with us.

Anyone taking a jaunt through the hallways and rooms of our home, the first thing that is likely to jump out is the sheer amount of attention our walls and shelves give to New York City. If asked, the reason for this visible presence woulld take the shape of a story. More specifically, the story of our relationship and our marriage. NYC has held an important place for us through the years on numerous levels, and remains an integral part of our journey.

Why do I mention this? Because I was thinking about my relationship to America as of late, in this present climate. In truth, NYC is far from alone in its respresentation on the walls and shelves of our home. That same tour would take you from the north shore of Duluth and the Mississippi waters to the coastal walkways of Savannah and the highway stretching the Pacific shores. You’d walk past Gordon Ramsey’s restaurant in L.A, the museums and bars of Nashville, the full stretch of the Smokey Mountains, Elvis’ home in Memphis, the canals of Olkahoma and the Greenwood District in Tulsa, the largest boot in the world in Red Wing, the riverwalk in Chicago, the arch in St. Louis, the old wood chipper in Fargo, the old route 66, MLK in Alabama, the historic Cheers bar in Boston, and the many national parks inbetween.

Not to mention the many many memories we have of our endless trips to Minneapolis.

All of which is to say, I have always loved spending time in America. I also can’t ever remember a time when all of these memories have been mired in so much tension. These days I find myself responding more and more frequently and more and more viscerally to American stories in books and film. While it’s been an intentional choice not to travel south of the border these past few years, it also hasn’t been a struggle to enforce.

What makes it worse is that these feelings, for as much as I know they are shared by many, are extremely hard to communicate. Because for me, in truth it reaches further than Trump and the rise of the American political “right.” It reaches further than appeals to “Christian nationalism.” For me, what the present moment has unearthed is something I think I have felt intuitively for a long while but have simply become more and more aware of as the years go on- a striking disillusionment with and cynicsm over the entire western enterprise.

To be clear, I don’t think this is reducible to “America.” However, America does carry a very specific represenation when it comes to the rhetoric that holds that western narrative in play. In fact, I would say that sits at the heart of the present shift in focus and attention that we are seeing across Europe and Canada over the past few months, responding to the ways in which America has presented itself in common speech as the reigning authority in matters of global politics by distancing ourelves and reimagining our relationships in different directions. As the analysis tends to go, there is a sense in which some people believe the problem is all the countries comprising Nato that have been failing to take responsibility for its seat at the table, making it necassary for America to hold us all to account. In this narrative the rest of us have been taking advantage of America’s wealth and might, and the time has come to start carrying our load.

Let me be clear about why this narrative bothers me. It’s not because the “truth hurts,” as I have heard plenty of americans suggest. Rather, it’s because the assumptions that lie behind this narrative are, for me, a massive part of naming the larger problem when it comes to that “western enterprise.” Let me clear about this as well- these assumptions underlie both sides, left and right, when it comes to American politics. The assumption is simply this: western progress, western democracy, western liberal (in the truer sense of the word) ideals, call it whatever you want, is the answer to the world’s problems.

And there is no way to get to America without first assuming and accepting that this particular lens does indeed reflect the truth of things. The fact that both sides of their political divide see America as the great protecter of this enterprise, the model after which the rest of the world should and must aspire, the great experiment that gives it life in the world at large, is simply betraying the issue that was already present long before America came on to the scene. As a heightened manifestion in its American expression to be sure, but nevertheless already present.

Thus what I find is, when I hear from the american right it’s typically about protecting what is often coined as the great American project or ideal. When I hear from the left, it’s usually the concession that America has somehow neglected or failed in it’s annointed role as the protector of these ideals. Two different ways of building off the same assumptions, both leading me to dig underneath to ask not whether I think either of these things are true about American history and American power (spoiler: I think such assumptions are incredibly ignorant of global history and how Empires work), but whether I think the larger narrative that this arises from is anchored in something true.

So here is where things come tumbling back inwards for me. What if we don’t see this enterprise as the answer? What if we see it as part of the problem? What if we don’t agree with this narrative? What if I question the history it tells? What if I don’t share those values?

As the British neuroscientist Ian McGilchrist says in his celebrated book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, sometimes for some of us to exist here in the West is to feel like a left brained person caught in a right brained (constructed) world (you’ll have to read the book to get the full nuances of his reclamation of that common right/left brain trope).

Which is to say, it can be a lonely place to exist.

Here’s where I might get even a little more bolder. There is no shortage of writers and thinkers echoing some of my sentiments above, but at a grassroots level i might summarize the problem in the following fashion. And I am borrowing somewhat from a recent episode with Rick Steeves, the famous travel writer whom was reflecting on what he has learned from getting to know other countries outside of America’s borders over the years. The ideal of America sounds great when someone is facing oppression, be it in the form of government or social poltical and economic realities. It’s not so great when one has to actually grapple with the so called “liberty” on the other side of this equation.

Which presents an interesting in-road into some of the nuances of this discussion. There is a reigning sentiment throughout the West right now that for as messed up as we see America to be at the moment, that somewhere and somehow the rest of us still have a western ideal to fall back on. One that gets expressed from the vantage point of not being considered the “present Empire,” but that quietly pulls from the echos of our storied history of colonization. The rest of us, as the narrative goes, have that semblance of baseline social structures in place which are the true lifeblood of that western democracy and protect us from the crazy. In some sense this is true. What it fails to see though are the cracks in the larger narrative itself. That’s where the attention really needs to be drawn towards, as that’s where the language of Empire arises from. From that vantage point, I find myself leaning into a book I read last year called My Roman History: A Memoir, in which a historian reflects on her move to Rome to make sense of it’s transition in a time when it had to find it’s identity without the label of Empire or the seat of the Pope. In other words, without the things that afforded it it’s place of superiority in the early growth of that western expansion.

This observation has stuck with me. At one point she observes, as Robert Kaplan also does in The Revenge of Geography, a book also about western expansion, that Empires do the most damage in those periods of time when they have already died but are still living as though they are very much alive (the walking dead imagery abounds here). As both state in their own way, the best thing a fallen Empire can do is come to see itself on the same level as everyone else. And yet rarely, if never, do Empires do this. To a degree we can see this in Britain, but like Rome and now America, they once dug their heels in just as hard. Some of the greatest attrocities inherent to western colonization were birthed from this reality.

There is a larger arc that emerges in this discussion however. And that has to do with all of the Empires that have birthed, given rise to, and seeded the whole Western enterpirse. This is where the particular shape of this resistance comes into play, as it is unique to this moment of history. In many ways, it’s near impossible to break through the conception of America precisely because, as a collective West, we are still convinced that the Western ideal hangs in the balance of that relationship. That’s what really holds us captive. Dig behind that and you have the often unstated, unrealized but wholly apparent assumption that we are somehow on the right side of history as part of the West. Dig further and that’s what holds up this unspoken notion embedded in our narrative that we are, in fact, better than the rest. Morally superior, technologically superior, telling a more enlightened story and upholding the great human endeavor for control through our accomplishments. If not stated overtly, it is what colours so much of what our narrative hands us. To challenge that? To speak about a very real sense of disillusionment with that western enterprise? That western narrative? To find onesself questioning its promises and its validity? That is the thing that becomes impossible.

Thus, that’s what has been on my mind as of late as I muddle my way through books like The Romans: A 2,000 Year History by Edward Watts, Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It by Samuel McDonald, Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckert, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations by Carl Fray, to name a few. No answers, perhaps just the feelings of disillusionment as I ponder my past and present relationship to this idea called America. Once upon a time I was free to travel those roads through places that I assumed were just like the rest of us. What I feel these days is a loss of innocence, but a loss that reaches beyond those borders, even as they simitaneously keep coming back to it over and over again.

Send Help (Sam Raimi)- The anticipated return of Raimi to what he does best, which is full on unfiltered horror/thriller mode. Don’t sleep on McAdams however, who seems charged up here to give Raimi some competition on that front. Whatever commentary it leaves slightly uncooked and underutilized it more than makes up for in entertainment value

Pike River (Robert Sarkies)- The talented New Zealand filmmaker, who’s last film was in 2006, returns with this story about a real life mining disaster that, in Sarkies’ own words on the Point of View podcast, emerges with a naturally embedded inherent ready-made drama. This allows him to step back and give his focus to drawing out a patient, immersive human drama that works to place us as viewers within the naturally existing tension while bringing the distinct voices whom lived through the trauma, a group of women left to fight against the powers for the lives and memories of their partners, to the forefront.

Dracula (Luc Besson)- A pitch perfect balance between camp and substance, doing a lot with a relatively low budget. Especially in the way it moves between these grand sequences to the more intimate and contained setting of the castle. Melding that grand mythos with its particular take on the character allows this to find something suprisingly human underneath the vampire motif, giving us a take on the famed figure that reaches for something more transcendent and redemptive, both as a love story and as religious reflection

La Grazia (Paolo Sorrentino)- A political film for our times. following a leader reaching the end of his term and grappling with the many different interconnecting elements of his legacy and story. Introspective, but also relentless in its interogation as it wrestles with bigger moral and existential questions. Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino (the Young Pope, The Hand of God, The Great Beauty) tells a story that brings some of the natural crisis of those questions to the surface, wondering about the ways in which, although we like to believe that something like progress exists, that belief tends to exist solely to satisfy our own need for power and control. Which begs another question; why do we seek control. I think the underlying answer in this film is that our need to seek control (read: the Western narrative) within the chaos betrays our real and true need for meaning. Or in other words, truth. Truth that exist outside of and beyond the wars and muddied and incoherent and inconsistent terrain of our constructed political machines. The sort of meaning that finds us when we are freed from our need to give the societal constructions an authority it doesn’t otherwise have, constructions which give us the illusion of this being about something more than our present sense of superiority. That it frames this within the story of a single leader grappling with the honest questions when all the pretenses that the public light demands and evokes is part of what makes this one powerful.

Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie (Matt Johnson)- Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson returns following the success of Blackberry with this quirky, ridiculously fun comedy that stands as one of the best films of the slate in these early months of 2026. Made all the better going in blind and seeing it with a crowd.

GOAT (Tyree Dillihay)- Whoever came up with the idea to pair the character of a goat with the acronym GOAT was probably sitting there thinking wait, no one else has done this yet? It’s so obvious and on the nose that it works, especially because the film takes the themes that underly that seriously. This is a grassroots level script that isn’t afraid to dig into some of the weightier motifs, using a memorable cast to flesh that out. There’s nothing overtly inventive here, but the lack of gimmicks and cheap tricks make it a refreshing early animated entry

Crime 101 (Bart Layton)- A much different film than the trailer sells it to be, and I loved the old school detective crime drama vibe. What surprised me the most was how invested I was in the characters. Car chases, moral dilemmas, commentary on the system, and solid pacing, all packaged in a decent amount of movie at 2 and a half hours. Reminded me of why theaters matter to these mid-budget, mid-level projects.

Wuthering Heights (Emerald Fennell)- Opinions will (and have, and do) vary on this much publicized adaptation by Fennell. A Director that I am not fond of and still, after seeing this film, am not on board with. Grant that I have never read the book and knew little about the story going in, but I found the story to be frustatingly devoid of commentary or meaning. It’s like a ship set out to sail without an anchor, but perfectly content to just be there, pulling us back and forth with the waves of its full cast of equally deplorable characters doing ugly things for no apparent reason, characters whom shift with the tides on the drop of a dime seemingly just to move the plot forward. It’s not just that I actively disliked this one, it’s that I desperately wanted it to end sitting through the experience, and felt worse for having endured it. There’s a commentary buried underneath, but cloaked in this adaptation it rings hollow and empty. It looks pretty though, I’ll give it that, and it’s definitely more accessible than Saltburn.

How to Make a Killing (John Patton Ford)- Not as good as Emily the Criminal, which had the benefit of being the American Director’s debut, but if you liked that film you should have a good time with this one. It’s got the same sort of flavour, just a bit more polished and obviously constructed, which I would say are the things that keep it from rising to the same level. That and it trades Emily’s emphasis on character for a more honed focus on the story. A nice third act twist on a narrative level helped to ensure that the journey retained some of its urgency.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (Gore Verbinksi)- Rango meets Pirates meets Mouse Hunt meets The Ring. Which is to say, if you mashed together all the film of Verbinksi’s career this is what would likely pop out. Sometimes bizarre, abundantly quirky, unapologetically unconventional, it’s content to exist in its own mind and world, evoking the madness that its apocalyptic type premise (of a world seemingly descending into and being consumed by its own sense of crazy) needs. That “all in” quality is what sells this, and to be sure the theatrical landscape is a far more interesting place with this occupying the screens.

Alberta Number One (Alexander Carson)- Canadian Director Alexander Carson has drawn up a love letter to the prairies that somehow manages to conjure up some empathy and understanding for our often “side-eyed with nervous uncertainty” province. To it’s credit it’s not afraid to give a well rounded critique in the process. That it asks us to consider other layers to this picture is the journey we as viewers are being asked to go on, and it proves worthwhile.

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (Baz Luhrmann)- From the Director who gave us the somewhat divisive biopic Elvis in 2022, a film that I was much higher on than some others (it was among my top films of that year and an experience I deeply resonated with) comes an impressive concert film that functions equally as a probing documentary into what, as the real life footage helps to underscore, remains one of America’s most tragic and revealing life’s and stories Elvis is a microcosm for so much of that American ethos, and as such is one of the most captivating inroads into understanding that cultural (and political) reality. Or more so, the sort of thing that it produces. Luhrmann deftly and expertly brings together a mix of old footage in a way that not only makes for a thrilling and captivating on-screen experience, but sheds new light on a familiar and iconic figure. Easily drawing us under his spell, leaving us to wonder about and wrestle with where we find ourselves once we come back to reality.

In the Blink of an Eye (Andrew Stanton)- Life Itself. That’s the film that kept coming to mind for me as I watched this new anticipated film, a live action debut from Stanton whom is known for his animated fare. Why? Partly because it shares that past, present, future interconnecting timeline. More so because it shares that unabashed sentimentality that drives critics nuts. For what it’s worth, my embrace and love of Life Itself set me at odds with the overall critical consensus, and I don’t know that I would go to battle for this film quite to the same degree. I don’t think the film is technically as strong and its themes a bit more superficially drawn. But I did appreciate what it was doing towards a similar degree, and I found myself williing to give myself over to the emotional journey of it’s delicate dance between matters and themes of life and death and meaning. You can see it fighting to capture some of those famed Wall-E sensibilities and reflections with it’s sci-fi premise, and for the moments where that breaks through it is enough to keep the film afloat.

My February Reads:

1. Onesself in Another: Participation and Personhood by Susan Grove Eastman (Kobo e-book)
   A long time coming but my first Eastman book (although I was familiar with her writings through interviews and articles on her work on Paul). Eastman is a proponant of participationist theology/philosophy, which is the position I hold to myself, and while this isn’t an easy read, I’d stop short of calling it inaccessible. It’s simply a book that demands time and study, which for me was extremely rewarding.
2. The Art of Asking Better Questions: Persuing Stronger Relationships, Healthier Leadership, and Deeper Faith by J.R. Briggs (audiobook)
   Highly quotable and a super easy and quick read. It’s divided between the theoretical and the practical, of which I lean far more in the direction of the former in terms of my interest. Thankfully Briggs gives time upfront (the first half of the book) to exploring the what and why of our questions.

3. Sea of Memories by Fiona Valpy (Kindle e-book)
Sentimental, but in all the right ways. I love how it begins so contained and then breaks wide open into a more sweeping narrative. Mostly I was immersed in its setting, which went a long ways in helping the characters to come alive as well. Blends history, war, relationship, seaside France and Parisian setting, family and art into an examination of its inter-generational discussion

4. The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel by Helen K. Bond (Kobo e-book)
   If you are interested in the idea of the Gospels as biography and why it matters to our understanding of these writings, this, if I might be so bold, should be considered the place to begin. A definitive work to that end, and richly researched. As it argues, the best way to understand what are complex and Jewish compositions is to narrow in on the world that they emerged within, the world of Greco-Roman hellenized biographies. This allows us to see the form the authors chose to communicate those distinctly Jewish concerns, and also to see how they set themselves apart in a way that forces a necessary conversation.
5. Scion of the Fox (The Realms of the Ancient, Book 1) by S.M. Beiko (physical)
   A whole new way to look at and imagine Winnipeg. A nice way of affording our city a kind of mythos. It’s a bit messy, but there’s a lot of worldbuilding that makes it fun, expecially if you are a local (and this is a local author), and very definitely when it hits the fast and fury of the third act.
6. We Did Ok, Kid: A Memoir (audiobook)
   I thought I knew Hopkins going in. Turns out I knew very little. I loved getting to know the reknown British actor, and I really fell for his story, caught as he was between the contrasting dynamic of the faith of one caregiver and the athiesm of another. With a particular spiritual experience anchoring the space inbetween, he navigates the struggles of success and alcoholism with a calculated pragmatism that is constantly being humbled as he goes. A calculated world that, for him in the scope of his story, keeps being unveiled as something far more. Enough so that the words of its title, the mantra “I’m okay, we are okay,” becomes a repeated refrain, which the book is then able to speak over him in the twighlight years of his aged life.
7. The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life by Frederick Buechner (Kindle e-book)
   Classic Buechner, which you either appreciate or you don’t. A quiet and unrestrained meandering through thoughts and wonderings and observations, always finding its way to a necessary point of revelation. In this case anchored in his stated interest in learning how to stop and pay attention to life along the way.
8. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May (Kobo e-book)
   The book begins in November with the onset of fall and ends in March with the coming Spring. I tried to stick with the seasons, but i admit I got restless (ironically) enough to fast track the final section. i wasn’t getting on its wave length enough to really absorb what the author was looking to do. Part of that was the tendency to scatter her thoughts. I did like the idea though, and there was enough here to anchor its essential concept- the importance of wintering both in nature and as humans- in something interesting. Winter, literally and metaphorically, as something we learn to embody rather than resist so as to bring about an understanding of real (and eternal) transformation.
9. Remain by Nicholas Sparks and M. Night Shyamalan (physical)
   Notable for exceeding my expectations. Not that it is a brilliant literary work, but that it’s a fun chemistry to unpack with the two voices. What I really appreciated was how tightly focused it is on a thematic level. Which compliments a simple sttory structure that follows a cast of characters seeking to unravel a mystery. Doesn’t require a whole lot from the reader, and sometimes that’s exactly what one needs from a particular book.
   
   10. Abiding in Amen: Prayer in a Secular Age by Wesley W. Ellis (Kobo digital)
   I have always struggled with the idea of prayer. At least in part because I’m not very good at it. It causes anxiety and confusion and uncertainty. Which is why I find myself returning to the topic from time to time Ellis’ study on the idea of prayer stands out for the way he pushes through to the root of some of this anxiety, namely the tendency to see prayer as a discipline. This exploration takes us through a robust examination of secularity as well, a term that needs reimagining in its own right so as to see see how prayer enters that fray as part of a larger and needed conversation.
   
   11. Redeeming Eden: How Women in the Bible Advance the Story of Salvation by Ingrid Faro and Joyce Koo Dalrymple (Kobo digital)
   A much buzzed about book from 2025. A book I read in tandem with the one listed below (The Girl Who Baptized Herself), which to me created a fascinating juxtaposition of shared concerns arrived at and addressed from two very different vantage points. For Faro and Dalrymple, the problem of the systemic oppression of women within the history of Christianity’s development is addressed by seeking to reclaim the texts that cultural realities have distorted through their weaponization. I have to think that anyone coming to this book honestly, regardless of their feelings on the scriptures, would need to take their work seriously, as they do an incredible job of showing the grounds of the story the scriptures are telling to be one in which women are being raised up and centered as a driving force of its redemptive arc.
   
   12. The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth by Meggan Watterson (audiobook)
   Like Redeeming Eden, Watterson seeks to address the problem of social and systemic oppression within the patriarchal influences of Christian history. Her way into that discussion, unlike Faro and Dalrymple, is to argue for the reclamation of the lost scriptures which she sees as being demonized by the patriarchy that controlled the act of canonization. From this vantage point she sees the truth of Christianity running underneath what were the competing forces of the texts that anchor the canon, texts that support patriarchy, and the buried voices that reflect a resistance to this dominant power. Most specifically she seeks to bring the scriptures about Thecla to the surface as an example. While I found many of her assumptions and her readings of history to be questionable and reductive, I think much of what she writes brings an important complimentary piece to the larger discussion that Faro and Dalrypmle are engaging. I have to wonder if Watterson’s own thesis could be strengthened by taking into account the evidence they bring to light in Redeeming Eden, giving more credibility to her desire to break from some of the tendencies to see “the canon” as a tightly guarded entity which, usually through doctines of inerrancy, refuses to engage something like the story of Thecla as part of a world behind the text engaged in the nuances of its own conversations and struggles and disagreements.
   
   13. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (physical)
   Probably the most buzzed about ficiton book from 2025. Which is always dangerous going in with lofty expectations. I can see why people loved it. It’s unique. It’s different. It inspires an embrace of a lost art in a world where physical and tangible and embodied acts of living have become antithetical to the shape of modern society. I don’t know that I loved it so much as I appreciated it, although I think there is an element here of trying to get into the particular rhythms of its unique structure. Finding its story within the series of letters that frame its chapters. There were moments where I got there, and that’s where I found msyelf enjoying it the most. Where I could feel the urgency and impassioned nature of the discourse through snail mail breaking open motivations and desires and emotions. But as soon as I found that flow I found myself becoming aware of the structure once again, which would pull me out. Overall though I enjoyed it.
   
   14. Moonlight Express: Around the Woirld by Night Train by Monisha Rajesh (audiobook)
   A good compliment to Pamela Mulloy’s Off the Tracks: A meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel, and Dan Richards Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark. In some ways an amalgamation of the two. I was most enchanted with Rajesh’s reflective process of boots on the ground explorations of night trains around the world in the first half. It’s in the second half where her lens becomes most clear and active, revealing someone who sees and understands the world we are observing on this journey very differently than me. Which of course is perfectly fine in its own right- trying on different lenses should be a basic part of how we navigate this world. But as with most reflections, there comes a point when, if a lens simply doesn’t make sense for you in its interpretation of the world we share and are looking at together, it kind of hits a bit of an obstacle And its in the second half that she starts to build further on a foundation that I simply felt distanced from. I can see the world shes seeing from that train window, but not her assessment of it. In the case of both Mulloy and Richards, my experience was quite different, thus I got a lot more from it

*as stated elsewhere in this space, I’ve been slowly putting a rough draft of a project I’ve been working on forever (writing my life’s story) down in this space where I can let it breathe and have it hold me accountable to finishing it someday. Emphasize “rought draft,” but here is another installment:

I imagine that, for anyone who has wrestled with and experienced chronic nightmares, they know how hard it is to shake those demons. Night time becomes their playground, that liminal space where they are able to prey on one’s fears. A space where we become truly vulnerable to these vivid portraits being imprinted on our minds. 

More, in fact, than just a matter of the mind. 

I am five or six years old. Bedtime for me was never a matter of simply giving in to the needed sleep a young body requires. I never knew what awaited me on the other side of the transition from wakefulness to dreaming. There was a transient quality that I noted about the whole process, and through these ealier years the invetible monsters residing within my unconscsious psyche that I both now feared and was growing to expect became more and more common.

And I would always know the moment when their imminant arrival would be made clear, as my chronic nightmares, which played like reoccuring episodes of a serialized show, always picking up where I had left off, would each begin in the same way. I could feel and was consciously aware of that odd and unexplainable moment between wakefulness and sleep, a moment in which I have one foot in both worlds, and it would be in my awareness of occupying this space that I would suddenly experience this feeling of being sucked down a dark, black hole.I didn’t want to go, and yet I had no other choice.

I would emerge from this hole in my dreamspace, again fully aware and conscious of where I was. These dreams tended to tackle similar motifs. One of the most common dreams would find me still in my own bed. Which was always disorienting, because this is the same place in which I was whisked away from the slumbering body that, in some bizarre way, seemed to co-exist with me in this terrorized image of a different kind of wakefulness. As I mentioned, this shared bedroom with my two brothers was one part of a single room, divided by a doorway that separated our space from my parents space. The first thing I would endeavor to do is try to get through that doorway to my parents sleeping space, but I never could. It would inevitably be blocked by something (usually piled up mattresses), and in my efforts to climb over, the beast, the being, whatever it was (it was always the same figure) would come up the stairs and drag me back with it.

It was at this point that I would find myself trapped by this presence, in one particular case chasing me away from our house only to find myself stuck in a loop, experiencing the same feelings of fear over and over again. In another trapping me in a maze that led me deeper and deeper into this ever pressing darkness.

Yes, this was me at 4/5 years old. I’ve spent my entire life since pondering and wondering over what this was. Where did these nightmares come from? Why and how was I having such a vivid existential crisis at a time when I was still barely discovering what the world was? Why do these dreams remain as vivid and real to me all these years later as they did when I was 5 years old?

The truth is, I don’t know. I’ve been given different kinds of answers from people with different sorts of predications and bias, some insisting it has a spiritual origin while others read it through the lens of material explanations. What I do know is that these nightmares, defined as they were through the exercising of some very real fears, have followed me my whole life, simply manifesting itself in different ways within different contexts. I no longer have these chronic nightmares (as I’ll get to in a moment), but the older I got (and get) the more I found it marrying to other sorts of tangible expressions, such as my ensuing battles with anxiety and depression.

The beast is, I have found, a slippery thing. A shapeshifter if you will. And it’s usually at the moment when I think I’ve finally outgrown those childhood fears that they prove as alive and well as they’ve always been, simply finding a new way to impose itself into my ever changing contexts.

And yet, embedded in my memory is a parallel thread. These are moments where I have found myself freed from a specific expression. Moments where hope and healing are made alive, These memories muddle the narrative, I have found, breaking the cycles even where the beast still lingers.

A first turning point came when I had reached Grade 5. I had transitioned from the public school system to our local private institution (Calvin Christian School) in grade 4, In my second year now, it had become common place for me to be riding my bike to school, which followed a meandering street towards these specific short cuts through some as of yet still undeveloped fields towards our bay about 10 or so minutes away. I remember having had a particularly rough day and a long previous night, the sort, familiar to me by this point, that would sit and perculate in my mind through the minutes and hours. At this particular moment it was the afternoon, thus I was coming home from school. I had decided to put my headphones in and was listening to a tape as I was riding. Thus the reason I did not hear or see the car coming around the bend behind me before I turned to cross the road.

What I remember is briefly turning my head to see a car now directly in my face. All I could think to do in what would have been counted in mere seconds, was to close my eyes and throw up my arms.

When I opened my eyes again I was on the other side of the car. Still on my bike. Without a scratch. At which point I remember hearing and experiencing two different things simultaneously.  One was the driver, whom had gotten out of their car and was now yelling at me. I remember hearing distinct words

“But how”

“I hit you.”

“This makes no sense.”

“Why weren’t you watching!!”

As these words were filtering in and out of my consciousness I was acutely aware of another voice, one which was speaking with far more clarity and attention. It told me to “let go of my fear.” It assured me that I would have “a long life” (whatever that means I still have no idea) and that my life “would be important.”

Where did this voice come from? My adult mind tends to look at it with skepticism, especially where a life long struggle with fear persists. Too ambiguous to mean anything, too generic to have relevance. The product of a young mind prone to fears and delusions. But even as I do, I have to attend for the way this experience changed the world for that young kid in that moment. I know what it did for the child’s mind for a fact, whether my adult senses trust its reliablity or not. While I didn’t understand the words (truth be told my fears were not exactly manifesting as an awareness of finitude or anything like that, and I wasn’t fearing what we might call physical death), I knew the feeling that followed. It felt like a weight had been lifted off of me. Like some chains had been unshackled, for as corny as that old religious language sounds.

Most important, the chronic nightmares stopped from that point forward.

There’s a lot of life inbetween, but this event is one that would not remerge in my consciousness again until my late twenties and early thirties (in a powerful way, which I will get to). After my graduating year, much of my identity and life would become wrapped up in this small house church turned eventual non-denominational mega-church. I’ll dig deeper into that part of my story later too. But the 10 year span between between 1994 and 2004, would be the period of my life when I found myself really fleshing out my relationship to this idea I called God and faith, something which would come to a head in 2002,2003 as that old beast would rear its head once more. Long before this period of my life however I find this odd memory. This odd story, just sitting there in the atmsophere of my wrestling. I don’t know that its something I would say I forgot, although maybe in a way that’s true. It’s simply something I had compartmentalized. It meant what it meant to that child. The car? The life that almost ended? Those weren’t particularly shocking or revelatory in the moment. What was important was that this demon I had been battling for so long had finally been defeated.

*as mentioned elsewhere, last year I sarted to construct my life story. I’ve slowly been forcing myself to put some of the rudimentary writings, in all of its rough and unedited form, into this space so as to hold myself accountable to it. This is another entry:

As I’ve already mentioned, memory is a peculiar thing. Fleeting in its nature. Maleable. Manipulable. Yet any sense that we might have of our lives, at least as something real and tangible and coherent, remains rooted in our ability to formulate these memories into a narrative. A story. What we perceive of who we are begins and ends with our memories- who we remember ourselves to be within the story of our lives.

Thus memory is, at its heart, an act of imagining, or imagination. In remembering who we were we also discover who we are. Or more importantly, we begin to trust this story to say something true about ourselves, and therefore the world that we inhabit.

For me, one of the more fascinating aspects of this truth is the way it roots us in time and place. Thus, to remember is not an act of the mind but an act of embodiment. Or in theological terms, memory can be understood to be an act of incarnation. This is what makes memory trustworthy. This is what makes our lives more than mere data points that we can string together as a bunch of regurgitated, verifiable facts. To trust our memories is to learn how to tell our story in a way that finds us inhabiting time and space.

Time- it’s the early 1980’s.

Space- a north end neighborhood in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

One benefit of growing up in a family that moved no less than 8 times in the first 20 years of my life is the ability it gives me to travel these same physical roads back into the story of my life. These roads and the houses they lead to, are markers. Walking through these old neighborhoods that each defined a piece of my childhood might feel foreign to and disconnected from the changed landscape of my present, yet this is the birthing place for rebuildling the memory of who I was.

As things tend to go, its worth confesesing that I inherited this same sense of restlessness, moving no less than 6 times in a span of 10 years after I moved out of my parents home in 2004. It also remains deeply curious to me to ruminate on how my present location, nestled on the cusp of Winnipeg’s infamous north end (quite literally, as if we lived on the opposite side of the street- read: the north side- we would be in a different neighborhood entirely), is mere blocks (google has it as a 3 minute drive) from where I spent the earliest years of my life, close to the corner of Manitoba avenue and Arlington.

Sadly the iconic Arlington bridge, known for its steep incline, was officially closed off and decommissioned a few years back. Growing up in this neighborhood this was one of the main throughfares for getting from the north end of the city to downtown, and I have fond memories of my dad hitting the gas of that old station wagon on the way up the ramp, attempting to achieve record heights jumping the levelling road at the top.

The old mom and pop ice cream shop at the corner of Manitoba and Arlington is also gone. I spent many a day meandering over to that cream coloured neighborhood hang out, especially after becoming aquainted with one of its regular visitors- a dog whom resembled Mr. Mugs, the old English Sheepdog made famous in the 70’s and 80’s by Canadian children’s author Martha Kambeitz and Carol Roth.

He was a spitting image, an oversized dog with a thick double coat bristling in the sheen of its white and grey markings. People of course told me it wasn’t actually Mr. Mugs, but if you asked my 6 year old self I would have insisted he was the real deal. I wasn’t about to be duped by other people’s skepticism.

As far as I’m aware, our own dalmation cross never made his aquaintance, although he also wasn’t around for very long. He had a bad habit of running away, and on one occasion we weren’t able to track him down. In my childhood imagination I liked to imagine the two of them somehow making their way through the world together like a cast of character in one of those famed books.

Speaking of that old dalmation, it’s entirely possible this is where my love for animals began. Not just with our family dog, as my level of reponsibility at the time was admittedly near zero, but with my growing awareness of a life unlike my own. He was an outside dog. We had a doghouse pushed up against the house beside the side door where we he would greet us and we would spend time just hanging out. I have a faint memory of one of us brothers taking him for a walk and losing the leash in a panic (as I said, he loved to take off). Or, much more vividly, a memory of the historic snowstorm that not only locked us in our house but buried him in his doghouse, leaving my dad needing to dig him out. What is perhaps most ingrained in me is the tensions this early relationship would create, awkening me to those hard and difficult feelings that come from experiencing life in a world marked by suffering and death.

This also came from the stories I started consuming. What started with Mr Mugs turned into my consumption of Thornton Burgess’ The Bedtime Story Books, leading as well to novels like Charlotte’s Web, Beautiful Joe, and Where the Red Fern Grows. This part of my story wll come into play in some important ways later, but here I find the seedbed for a part of myself that remains just as apparent to me today as it did nearly 45 years ago as I began to become aware of the world I was inhabiting. That sense of needing to care for this life relegated to the yard outside our house, and that first sick feeling that accompanies his eventual loss.

Some of my fondest memories from this time in my life revolve around our perusing of the neighborood. All three of us boys made a past time hanging out with the kids down the street, a boy named Arnold and a girl named Brea. We would spend our days wondering the neighborhood together, under the grand shadow of the massive Ukrainian Catholic Church to the north of us, a mark of this once central bustling hub of Ukrainian and Polish immigrants, and to the South of us the open park where we spent copious amounts of time climbing this giant old tree and doing what young kids did at that age- racing our way to the top and hanging out on the hightest branches in a way that made us feel like we were on top of the world. We sold lemonade and we played hop scotch games with our rudimentary drawings on the concrete slabs of the sidewalks lining both sides of the street.

One of my favorite memories though is one that, to this day, no one believes. It remains seared into my brain as though it happened yesterday. I can replay every detail, from the cracks in the sidewalk to the countours of our neighbors house a little ways up the block with its front porch and iconic shapely posts. We were out playing and we had stopped over at Arnold’s place. While I’m not precisely sure what was occupying us at the time, although I can imagine we were coming back from playing in the park, what I do remember is remaining outside, lingering behind the others as they went around and inside to Arnold’s kitchen. That’s when I turned around and found myself face to face with what looked like a wasp the size of my shoe. Just sitting there on the banister of his front deck with what looked like monsterous demon eyes. There were legendary stories of killer bees kicking around at the time, and so the first thought that went through my head was that some version of such a thing had finally arrived in my corner of Winnipeg and it was now up to me to break the news to the world. So I did what any sensible kid might do- I ran back to our house and got my dad.

Of course, by the time I got back it was gone. And with it went the possibility of having someone else to corrobarate my memory of this monumental find. What I can confidently say is that there are few more scenes from this time in my life that I can recall with such clarity and immediacy. And sure, it’s a nice piece of lore to help the story of my childhood feel bigger than life.

All I can do is imagine. Or in this case, remember.

Whatever it was, it was abnormal enough to capture my attention. Perhaps more importantly, this was my first experience of needing to communicate something that people who would and could not understand. A moment of having something I believed must be true being met with the skepticism of the world around me. This would go on to shape my world moving forward.

Our house at the time was modest. A basic two story bungalo, the main floor containing a kitchen that, not inconsequentially, my dad almost burned down after being left alone to cook us dinner. I remember sitting on the couch and seeing this sudden flash of light, followed by the smoke alarm and, of course, the ensuing smoke. My dad came running out of the kitchen grabbed us (or it might have just been me), and brought us outside, me holding the one cherished possession of my childhood, a small old Linus sized blanket knitted by my grandma, and my dad moving around in a frenzied state. There would be a big black circle on the ceiling to mark the occasion. This might or might not be what led my mother to retire from her job as a nurse.

Upstairs there was a double room. The first section is where us boys slept on bunk beds, while the enclave, positioned just through a doorway, was where my parents slept, tying the two spaces together. Speaking of my childhood feeling larger than life, I suppose killer demon wasps the size of my shoe has a certain kind of dramatism befitting such a story. In its own way, and perhaps in a different and much more intuitive way, it was the years I spent in this house, and inparticular the nights I spent in this room, that give these memories its own kind of heightened presence. This is where my life long journey with existentialism really begins to manifest itself, in a very real way through what became a very real and very powerful struggle with chronic nightmares that carried me through the remaining years in this particular neighborhood.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts in this space, I’ve been journeying through the Gospel of Mark this year, both with my church and with select authors/commentaries. Along this journey I’ve been trying to stay open to whatever God desires to say through this study and meditation.

Sometimes the thoughts that come from this are larger ones. Such as the pardigm shifting inviation to see the Gospel of Mark as a parallel portrait of creation/new creation, hearing in its opening words (the beginning of the Gospel of Christ Jesus) not just the beginning of the story of Jesus (as in a biography), and not just the culmination of the story of Israel (as in a narrative), but as the beginning of a new reality. The unfolding story is not simply about a Jesus in history, but about the life of its readers now occupying space in this inaugerated new resurrection reality. In this sense reading the Gospel According to Mark  also becomes our own biography, adopting ourselves into this same patterned way of being and existing and learning how to see the world through this lens.

And sometimes the reflections are small. As it is with this mornings reading from Chapter 7.

The focus point of this morning was the familiar verse, “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” (7:15) For so much of my life this verse has simply stood as an invitation into a form of Christian liberty, typically over and against the constraints of religious tradition. A tradition that of course gets framed within those bad and angry pharisees. The larger discussion about the ways in which we have turned the Pharisees into an unfortunate stereotype within streams of Christianity aside, trying to cut through the noise of that familiarity can be difficult, but there was a note from my commentary that helped reframe this verse in a fresh light.

This comes from the the climatic point of the larger discourse in this chapter regarding God’s Word and Tradition, which is found in 7:20-23

“And he (Jesus) said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

As my commentary (by James Edwards) points out, there is an intentional literary quality and structure to the way the author compiles this list that opens up a window into Jesus’ central point in verse 15, that “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”

To back up slightly first, the initial concern is the Pharisees noting that the disciples of Jesus were “eating with defiled hands.” Why does this matter? Because in the Tradition of the Judeans this represented a condition of impurity, and purity laws are intrinsically attached to the greater concern for idolatry. Within the larger framework of this Tradition lies the story of exile and promise, and thus any and all appeals to Tradition are not to rules but to the hope of being set apart for the sake of God’s expected renewal of a creation enslaved to Sin and Death, the source of the sin pollution that purity laws look to remove.

Readers of the Gospel according to Mark will notice once again the patterned movement from outside the house (with the crowd) and inside the house (with the disciples), a movement that is gradually blurding the lines between the two as the Gospel goes along. The house in Mark is temple imagery, thus this isn’t just about eating food with unwashed hands but about the larger portrait of the new creation reality being brought about “in Christ,” something that is renewing the whole of creation.

The transition from crowd (7:1;14) to house comes in verse 17, once agian asking this particular audience (the disciples) whether they understand the point. Which is where Jesus adds this climatic and informing explanation in verses 20-23, reflected through the following dynamics Mark’s literary/narative device:

• The list is broken into two collections of words, both bound together by the unique use of the word poneria (Greek, translated as evil or wickedness)
• The first 5 words are deliberately represented in the plural, indicating their external quality- they come from or happen on the outside- fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice
• The second collection of words are deliberately reprsented in the singular, indicating that they are reflecting what is birthed on the inside- deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.

To grasp how the ancient audience would have heard this in its second temple Judean context, all of the words presented in the plural would have been attached to matters of the Tradition. There are two possible ways of reading the emphasis to this end. Either it could read as the following: For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: Fornication? Theft? Murder? Adultery? Avarice? All of these things are rooted within, in the wickedness of the heart, such as deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.

Or, it could read from the opposite direction: For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: Fornication? Theft? Murder? Adultery? Avarice? The reason why these things matter within the Tradition is because they breed the wickedness of the heart within- deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.

Noting this literary device is more than just semantics. What becomes clear is, Jesus is not dismantling the relevance of Tradition in favour of some form of “Christian liberty.” Instead Jesus is explaining what the Tradition upholds- the story of God’s acting in the world. This is what understanding ANE purity laws opens up for modern readers. Where we might tend towards reading Law as legalism, a set of rules we must follow to be considered righteous and therefore on the inside, what purity laws actually indicate is a conception of two different realities- one enslaved to Sin and Death, the other liberated by Life and Transformation. Further, in the crass imagery of verse 19, depicting food as something that goes into our stomachs and out into the sewers, the brief interjection by the author’s own voice (a rarity in Mark) is not rendering the concern for idolatry as wrong or insignificant, the author is rather proclaiming the nature of God’s Kingdom having arrived in Jesus. If the accusation of the Pharisees’ concern is that they “are making void the word of God through their tradition,” (verse 13), the point of that accusation directly relates not to the undermining of the story this Tradition upholds, but rather the imagination its fulfillment demands. The word of God is made void. Meaning, it has been demonstrated to be proven false. What is this word? In Mark the word is the proclomation that underlines the Gospel or good news (1:1). For Mark, “the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has come near” (1:15) is the context for everything that follows, and it is marked by this movement of transformation out into the whole of creation. If this is, indeed the reality Mark’s audience occupies, the emphasis on this transforming work moves from the inside out. If we want to imagine a different reality, we begin by imagining a heart that is being renewed by the spirit.

Instead of being pulled out of a world in which we find these (plural) external realities, as was the case with the creation and formulation of Israel, the call is this movement into the world where God’s fulfillment is witnessed to through the transformation of the heart (understood as the seat of ther person). For any faithful Torah adherent this would have confjured up a recasting of the original creation story in Genesis 1-4 in light of the beginning of the good news, a new creation story. The question becomes, does our recontextualizing of the word of God believe this to be true or not. If not we are still occupying space outside of the garden. If so, we are occupying space in the new creation. Two different ways of seeing the world, two different ways of being in the world.

I was listening to an interview with Thi Nguyen, author of his newest book The Score: How To Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game, and it raised some intriguing questions regarding the role of “measures” when it comes to the way we experience life in this world.

His passion is games (see his book Games: Agency As Art), but his interest in the ways this applies to life in general on a philsophical and practical level. As humans we seem to want, or even need, to keep score. This brings about certain emotions and motivations that we would largely deem positive. To a degree its not so much about the outcomes but rather the engagement of challenge and competition.

But it also becomes somewhat problematic when we begin to look at this notion of measures in the broader playing field of life and society. Including our sense of meaning.

Measures carry this tension in which they need to be simple, coherent and accessible, and often presented within sharp dichotomies, in order to be revelant. At the same time these black and white terms tend to disguise the nuance underneath. What makes this more difficult is that the ones drawing out and working with the nuances (the experts) tend to be the minority few, while the ones participating in these games, in work and life and otherwise, tend to be the majority whom are actually the ones playing the games experts are anaylzying and manipulating.

Measures can also be defined as metrics. Metrics determine everything in society from the cost of goods to what we determine success. We find it in schools and workplaces and business structures and politics, family systems and social contexts. We see it in things like BMI to Rotten Tomatoes.

The whole world is a metric.

On a more universal front, particular measures typically rise to the top while others can sometimes be buried. Part of this is looking at the two primary ways of knowing- qualitative (nuanced and hard to communicate) and quantitative (simple and easy to access). In this portrait information is a specific thing that is meant to be shared across a vast cross-section of experiences. It is de-nuanced by necessity. Qualitative made quantitative. Which explains how modern society with its emphasis on technological (and other) progress strives to capture reality in this sort of “information.” Reality defined by numbers. And yet within this, a world with established and studied rules and norms, which all systems need to survive, has to contend with the similtaneous seperation of cultural and perseonal contexts and allegiances.

What struck me about this conversation is how what drives so much of the human experience in modern society, where there is a need to break down studies of complexity into simple and clear pictures that we can then control, remains a construct. It’s not so much that we are constructing reality, although to a degree it is, as reality itself being framed as construct. Here illusions of modern creation meet with the determinitive nature of reality, and more you get away from the minority and into the majority the more true this becomes. All of our lives and every individual can be broken down into “information” feeding a metric. If this makes us uncomortable this can also be seen as a metric, a study of human tendency.

Where this conversation really becomes relevant is when we look at the values or aims behind the metrics. This is where it becomes abundantly clear that the game of life, seen within these measures, is deeply inconsistent and incoherent when it comes to how and why it is applied. It makes sense when contained within particular goals, but not where it comes to purpose. And the author brings up that these two things are important to distinguish between. A goal can largely fluctuate and change and be contained, purpose cannot. And yet when it comes to the study and manipulation of metrics the latter is rarely if ever part of the picture., at least not in a way that is made evident.

On a practical level we can speak of those aspects of reality that contain immense variables. For example, what it means for one person to have a healthy life can be vastly different than the next person. Same with happiness. And yet society has to function by codifying shared metrics. Further, any variable still reflects an individual responding to metrics. Hence, what makes reality what it is and the way we assess this reality and the way we formulate our beliefs depends on the ways in which our base level assumptions can justify itself. In other words, complexity is not an antidote to reductionism in any way, shape or form. We still come up against the same wall.

Why does this matter? Because behind our actions and our choices is the always that lingering question- why. And perhaps the accompanying “what.” These are the assumptions that drive us. Where we see these things as being betrayed as false we thus tend to experience a crisis. This is how it works. Hence why, which we can see when the author speaks about human demand for transparency versus determinitive practice, we intuitively want transparancy because it helps us feel like we aren’t being duped by something false, and yet transparency also forces any process to become hindered and muddled, precisely because the majority cannot function without simplified metrics. This is what the powers manipulate all the time. This is the shape of society.

To ask why then is to actually assess such illusions and ask what we can say is real, both in terms of the reality that is driving us and in terms of whether that can be trusted to say anything about what we value. Even then, in a certain worldview our brains would appear to be hardwired to apply willful ignorance to any forms of disonnance. On a biological level we could not function otherwise. It’s more important to believe and think something is true than for something to be true. That our measures are often manufactured is simply about analysis and control.

I had been mulling over this during the course of this week. In the interview both host and author find this stuff exciting to parse out largely from within a materialist worldview. What I found interesting is wondering about how both host and author justify the value of these metrics beyond the game. What would be the aim beyond necessary manipulation for the sake of progress or construction, which of course can apply to the function of our own lives and the function of the minority with influence over society at large?

Is there any way to move beyond the game?

Alongside this i just finished Wesley W Ellis’ new book Abiding in Amen: Prayer in a Secular Age, which fittingly fits a parallel theory alongisde the ways in which we think about prayer. Ellis sees the “games” the author is talking about in the interview as a function of secularism, which describes a society that is all about the desire and need for control. This is inherent to societal and human function. It is also the thing the author sees prayer, properly understood, as designed to counter. The problem Ellis points out, is that prayer has become redefined within those same secualrist terms. It has become part of the game. Thus I thought my full review of that book could function as an interesting counter to Nguyen’s conclusions:

I have long struggled with the idea of prayer. I have deep rooted anxiety over praying in public, praying out loud, and I tend to view prayer through the narrow lens of duty and discipline, which of course only really serves to underscore how bad I am at praying.

This might be why I find myself revisiting the topic from time to time over the years. One point of awareness that I think I have gained through my studies is that prayer can be practiced and experience in all manners of ways. For me, reading is a form of prayer. Watching film is a form of prayer. I don’t do well with the typical “quieting of the mind” approach. The last thing I want to be is lost in my own head.

Weley Ellis’ book might be the best exposition of the problem however, that problem being our tendency to see prayer as a spiritual discipline, something he ties to the trappings of modernity (or in the terms of the title of this book, secularity). A word that author takes careful aims not to turn into a “malevolent force,” but rather the simple observation of a social and historical reality. Dialoguing with the German philosopher Hartmut Rosa, he defines secularity, or the project of modernity, as “making the world controllable.” (page 15) This leads to the “malaise of modernity,” which is simply disillusionment, recognized or not. More control (modern progress) leads to more uncertainty and less mastery and greater disconnection. It reduces reality to a question of what is useful, “objectifying reality” (page 17) in the process. In terms of the Christian faith and practice, this can be described as idolatry.

In terms of prayer, the author states the following;
“I believe this is how it feels to many who pray. They wonder why prayer isn’t working for them. They struggle because one cannot have a relationship with an idea, and we’ve made God into an idea. They wonder why they don’t feel they’ve mastered the discipline of prayer. So these questions about secularization are not posed to a secular them, outside of Christianity, but to the faithful (myself included) who pray- perhaps even regularly- but are often confronted with the feeling of a dead, frozen object instead of a living God.” (page 18)

This gets him into a theme that will carry through most of the book- prayer is our awareness of an uncontrollable world. “The good news is that whatever it is that we have engineered to death, it is not actually God. The dead thing is a false idol.” (page 19) The abide part of the book’s title then pushes to reframe this necessary aspect of prayer within the relationship it is meant to awaken. Prayer not as having but of being, not a means to an end but of being present with God. To abide in amen, a word that means “truly” or “certainly” is to abide not in the world we seek to control through prayer, but in the certain truth of God’s presence within an uncontrollable world.

This, the author insists, might sound obvious, but at its heart it is in fact a paradigm shift from the way we have become accustomed to think about prayer throuagh the lens of secularity. A shift from prayer as something we do and thus need to master to thinking about prayer as something God does. Here Ellis describes “a reversal in the trajectory” within the equation.

“i believe our struggle with prayer is one that can be solved not by doing more of anything but by letting things happen to us. It will require our getting out of the way, waiting, and allwoing the living God to act.” (page 49)

To “allow the first thought of prayer to be God’s action.” The author I think makes a profound statement to this end that this is not mere theological niceties, it “must meet the ground of our actual experience and emerge from it.” (page 50) It is something we come to know through participation. A participation that begins in the liturgical sense with the act of confession, which he defines as “removing whatever masks we may be wearing to hide our truest selves,” which is all of the stuff secularity has taught us to wear for the sake of control in a world built for manipulation and usefulness towards certain ends. A world that is designed to tell us where and how we are on the inside or on the outside. As the author writes, “It’s not merely that secularization has made it more difficult to believe in the existence of God. It is because secularization and the underlying epistemic and philosophical positions it has birthed (or perhaps from which it has been birthed, depending on how you look at it)- neoliberalism, capitalism, instrumental rationality, burnout, and developmentalism- have shifted the ground on which we stand and contorted the vantage point from which we pray, skewing our understanding of the very purpose, trajectory, and telos of prayer.” (page 58)

Again, this might sound trite or simple, but there is a profound resistance to moving from prayer as control to prayer as dependence. To moving from us as the starting point (the pray-er) to God as the starting point (the one who acts in drawing us to prayer). And one of the reasons this paradigm shift feels so much resistance is because God as the starting point means praying without control and without certianty. It strikes at the heart of belief and disbelief, essentially collapsing those things into a singular facet of this thing called “faith” (or its proper terminology, faithfulness or participatory belief). As the author states (page 108), if you are one who believes you will experience doubts, if you are one who doubts you will haunted by those things that lead us to wrestle with belief. We will always carry this tension (which the author cites Charles Taylor’s definition of a “cross-pressure”), which is precisely why prayer matters.

“No one defintion can fully sum up prayer, but each one captures something important about it. It is a raising up of our minds and hearts; a surge of the heart; sharing between friends; a long loving look at the real; and a conscious conversation.” (page 121) In short, the author sums this up as “a gift,” but in many ways a dangerous gift precisely because it calls us to give up control. A world, in conversation with Hartmut Rosa, defined by immanence and human agency can only lead to points of aggression. Which is exactly what we find within secularity. Not aggression as in violence (although it can be that to), but aggression as in aggressively needing to master the world through human ambition, be it within the context of our lives, enlightenment ideals, western progress. It is about stepping into a world where life is a constant measure of success of failure in this regard. And for anyone who also believes this aggression matters and has meaning to something (be it life itself or some idealized future aim), it leads us to constant propping up of illusions and delusions in order to justify the game.

That this thinking has infiltrated the church and the way we do church has simply lost the narrative of the clash of kingdoms to this end. As the author says, “when we should be talking about the crisis of faith, we tend to talk more about the crisis of effectiveness.” (page 138) That crisis of faith referencing the above tensions that belief and disbelief require. “Peace with God means conflict with the world.” Not conflict in the sense of opposition or violence, but the kind of abiding that teaches us how to see and engage something like secularity as a common human tendency in a world where God draws us to prayer. To learn how to engage the differences between abiding in amen of God’s rule and abiding in the great modern project. “The movement of prayer is the movement out of instrumental rationality and into… Christopraxis.” (page 144)  Something the author parlays into a discussion of Aristotles concepts of poiesis (activities that result in an end product) and praxis (activities that are ends in and of themselves). For Aristotle, human flourishing was understood to be found in the latter. For the term Christopraxis, participation in Christ is the end prayer seeks. Part of the great suprirse of praxis is that such a way of participation actually leads to tranfsormation. Which is counter intuitive to a secularity that has taught us to give our time to things that have measurable outcomes. The difference is the ability to name that which matters (praxis) and giving ourselves to that which we cannot name (poiesis). We seek the measurable outcome naturally because it gives us control. But the irony is we do so without any measurable way to define why it matters or means anything at all. We know this intuitively, which is why secularity takes its toll on us, but giving up control (the act of prayer) is the much more difficult thing to do.

So, the author says. “What if we thought of prayer as God’s act of listening before we thought of it as our act of talking?” (page 164) How does this singular paradigm shift change our perspective? Our prayer life? How does it challenge our long standing tendency to see prayer as a discipline (mechanicistic practice). It brings alive this crazy idea that “prayer is for nothing.” (page 169) Which sounds crazy, and yet, as the author posits, is precisely where we find everything to be in Christ as the gift of prayer, not the outcome of prayer. Prayer becomes preparation for greater participation in a world where secularity lives and breathes as a reflection of the tensions we carry and face. “Human being is not a product of human becoming or of human doing.” (page 177) That is the heart of this preparation. That is what guides us through the tension. All else has one singular corollation- death. To be “in Christ,” as prayer makes aware, is to corollate being with life.

“If prayer were merely a human action, it would be fragile and fleeting- as fragile and fleeing as our own belief. The possiblity of prayer would be dependent on our ability to pray. It would have to stand on our own strength and our limited (in)ability to control the world around us. It would sway with the tides of circumstance, rising and falling with our own uncertainties. But because prayer is a divine act- an act in which God invites us to join- it stands firm.” (page 187)